Impact

These are breakthrough times for biofuels. Driven by volatile energy markets and new public policy initiatives, biofuels production is booming and production capacity is rapidly growing. For the first time since petroleum emerged as the overwhelmingly dominant vehicle fuel a century ago, oil’s near monopoly on the market is breaking while farmers and rural communities are discovering a new source of prosperity.

At the same time a biofuels backlash is mounting. Record high corn prices are raising worries about food supplies. A new energy demand for agricultural products is bringing to the forefront long-time concerns about soil erosion as well as use of chemicals, fertilizers, water and genetically modified crops.

For these reasons, there is a great deal of interest in producing ethanol from cellulosic feedstock. Cellulosic biomass refers to agricultural, woody, and fibrous materials such as agricultural residues, forestry residues, industrial wastes (e.g., paper sludge), and major portions of municipal waste (e.g., waste paper). Although "biomass" includes materials other than cellulosic materials, in the context of U.S. energy production, the term is often used to refer specifically to cellulosic biomass.

However, cellulosic ethanol has significant technology hurdles to reduce the additional pretreatment step and enzymatic operating costs. These contradicting demands require new approaches and materials to increase both energy and process efficiency (most notably the cellulose pretreatment), to reduce enzymatic raw material cost, and maximize the creation of value-added by-products.

AlterVia Fuels is uniquely positioned because our technology has the ability to efficiently and economically break down complex cellulosic biomass for ethanol conversion. Our technology creates a higher surface area of cellulose within a proprietary supercritical binary fluid which enables faster conversion of sugars. This process also yields a significant reduction in energy consumption (e.g., petroleum, natural gas or coal) and electricity utilized. The net result is superior energy balance. This disruptive technology puts AlterVia Fuels years ahead of conventional technologies in the race to develop the next generation of cellulosic biomass technology.